The Best Stories, Sites and Fun From Around the Great Lakes State.
Articles, features, and posts about Michigan history and past events that shaped the state.
by The City of Alpena conducts service as part of the Detroit and Cleveland line. This 285-foot 2,000 horsepower sidewheel paddlewheel started service in 1893 and could carry up to 400 passengers and freight along the D&C’s “Coast Line to Mackinaw” run.
by An MSU professor wrote a book entitled Where the Boys Are. The subsequent movie made the yearly college Spring Break a cultural phenomenon for over 50 years.
by Captain Aaron Peer founded Grindstone City as a company with quarry operations in 1834.
Peer, is one of the earliest settlers of Huron County and holds title to many of the “firsts” in the Upper Thumb.
by The major roads and highways that we take for granted were once Michigan Indian Trails. The routes were perfect. Chances are you traveled on one of those ancient trails today.
by A large Midwest map of the Pere Marquette Railway for Michigan’s Summer Resorts 1913
by President Nixion visits Bad Axe Michigan to campaign for a special election during April 1974, just days before the Watergate scandal hits his administration.
by After the lumber industry collapsed in Michigan during the 1880s. The town of Port Crescent was abandoned and most buildings moved. Sand operations started for glass making.
by In the late 1840s, Michigan experienced a craze of building plank roads. Over 200 companies built over 5000 miles of plank roads.
by Henry Ford was instrumental in the development of the charcoal market in the 1920s to market leisure motoring.
by For decades, City of Detroit foresters industriously labored away in a quaint sawmill within Belle Isle Park, giving trees from streets and parks new life as usable wood after they were removed for road widening or death from disease, pests, or storms.
